Between the 18th
and 23th of November 2003, Essex group attendended
the project final review, which was held in Ivrea, Italy.
Click HERE
for a selection of photographs taken from that event.

Background:

The eGadgets
project is part of the Disappearing Computer
Programme. The funding for this project is derived from
the European Union's Fifth RTD Framework. In particular the project
is funded under the Information Societies Technology (IST), Future
and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative. The FET programme
is somewhat unusual in that, according to its own description,
"it is open to considering bold ideas whose realisation would
involve high risks. The philosophy is to let people try things
out - even if these things are only based on a dream, or a hunch,
with the promise of really leading to something in the future".

Vision:

The concept of eGadgets
is to create a conceptual and technological framework that will
allow ordinary people to assemble and "direct", with ease, a collection
of network aware computer based products (e.g. cellphones, music-players,
washing machines, heating systems etc) to provide collective functionality
to empower their lives beyond that possible by today's stand-alone
products. There is a widely held view by manufacturers of consumer
goods that to substantially increase the future market for such
goods, new techniques and frameworks are needed. In the terminology
adopted by this project, individual devices are called eGadgets;
collections of connected eGadgets are called GadgetWorlds;
the conceptual and technological framework is referred to as Gadgetware
Architectural Style (GAS).

The Essex Role:

The aim of the project
is to develop and validate the Gadgetware Architectural Style
(GAS): a generic framework shared by both gadget designers and
users together with some sample eGadgets and GadgetWorlds. GAS
will provide a design framework and operating environment that
will enable artefacts to communicate and co-operate in a consistent
comprehensible and predictable way. As mentioned above, GAS will
allow ordinary people to construct customised assemblies of e-gadgets
supporting the user in some particular environment (a GadgetWorld)
to perform tasks that reflect personal needs or wishes giving
rise to emergent functionality. An example of a GadgetWorld might
be a room in an intelligent-building in which environment and
entertainment based eGadgets work together to form an integrated
interactive environment. An innovative aspect of the project being
worked on at Essex will involve the application of artificial
intelligence methods such as fuzzy logic
and behaviour based architecture (more commonly
found in mobile robotics) to eGadgets to provide useful amounts
of intelligent functionality. The main Essex challenge to this
work is to develop compact reasoning and learning mechanisms
that are able to deal with the numerous inputs and highly dynamic
environments (both in the physical and network sense) that will
characterise GadgetWorlds. This project builds on existing research
that is described on our web site papers are available for interested
applicants.